Researchers who investigated a 2002 outbreak of conjunctivitis, a type of eye infection also called "pink-eye," among students at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire have said the germs may have spread, in part, through shared keyboards on university computers.

In a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Cynthia G. Whitney of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and her colleagues report that scans of 40 to 60 public keyboards performed during the outbreak showed no signs of the conjunctivitis-causing bacteria.

However, in a laboratory experiment using more sensitive detection techniques, researchers placed bacteria on a keyboard and were later able to recover samples of bacteria from the tainted keyboard, Whitney told Reuters Health.